Psychologist in the soup over food claims

Brian Wansink has been described as the “Donald Trump of food research” over his laboratory’s contentious use of dataEyevine

A prominent food psychologist who has advised the government has had one of his studies retracted by a scientific journal after claims that his team mishandled data in dozens of different papers.

Brian Wansink is director at Cornell University’s Food and Brand Lab in New York, where researchers are accused of repeatedly analysing a “flawed” experiment until they found publishable trends, in a practice known as “p-hacking”.

Last week the laboratory had a 2007 study, which found that the labels on food affected how it tasted, withdrawn by the Journal of Sensory Studies after an investigation found that the authors had cannibalised their own results from an article published seven years earlier.

Professor Wansink is the lead author of the retracted paper and has said…